Lessons learned from building a niche YouTube channel
By Emma Tracey, founder and CEO, CultRepo
Building a big audience around a niche subject can seem a bit contradictory. If your subject only appeals to a specific group of people, how do you build a channel at scale?
That’s exactly the challenge we set ourselves when we started CultRepo. We make long-form documentaries about the people and stories behind open-source software – not an obvious YouTube proposition when the platform has heavily integrated Shorts to appeal to TikTok era attention spans. And yet, our YouTube channel has grown to more than 400,000 subscribers, with our latest documentary reaching over 500,000 views in its first couple of months alone.
And we’re only just getting started! So here are the biggest lessons I’ve learned along the way:
1. Don’t underestimate the niche
Niche doesn’t always mean small, it actually just means highly engaged. So rather than diluting a specialist subject in an attempt to reach a broader audience, find ways to give the people who already care a reason to go deeper.
Open-source technologies such as Java, Python and C++ have well established communities built around them, both online and offline, that have developed and grown over many years. These people have been using such technologies for decades and have their own stories, debates and opinions to share.
The opportunity is to tap into that existing passion by finding fresh angles and giving audiences access to insights from the people who shaped these technologies. At CultRepo, this has helped turn viewers and enthusiasts into advocates for our content. Our films have been shared in developer forums such as Foojay and popular programming threads on Reddit, with that word of mouth playing an important role in the channel’s growth.
2. Find the human story
Even the most technical subject can make compelling content if you find the human story within it. Ambition, difficult decisions, disagreements, setbacks and surprises are what make people want to keep watching. Technology is the setting for our stories, but interviews allow us to explore what it was actually like to be there building it – what went wrong, how people responded and what happened next.
When we made The Java Story, we spent seven hours interviewing Java creator James Gosling. We had far more material than could ever fit into one film, but those conversations uncovered the lesser-known details that brought Java’s history to life whether that was manic last-minute rewrites, arduous legal battles and even Bill Gates’ concerns about the language.
The lesson is to look beyond the subject itself and find the people, personalities and stories that make audiences care.
3. Let the story dictate the format
There is constant pressure to make content shorter, but there is no single formula for holding an audience’s attention, particularly when you’re working with specialist subjects. At CultRepo, our YouTube channel ranges from sub-two-minute ‘bytes’ and 10-minute mini-docs to full-length documentaries of more than an hour. Each format serves a different purpose, and we’ve learned not to force a story into a particular format simply because that’s what the platform favours.
Some ideas can be explored in a few minutes while others need time to introduce characters, build context and let the story unfold. The key is to understand how much time the story genuinely needs, then make every minute earn the audience’s attention.
4. Give your audience something they can’t get elsewhere
Building an audience around a specialist subject starts with understanding what makes people care about it in the first place. For us, that has meant taking people’s passion for open-source technologies seriously.
A niche proposition also needs a clear reason to exist. At CultRepo, that means going beyond explaining what a technology does to uncovering the stories behind how it was built. Our films give audiences access to people, perspectives and history they might not otherwise encounter, turning specialist knowledge into something worth watching.
The key isn’t necessarily to make a specialist subject more mainstream, but to understand what your audience values and give them something they can’t easily get somewhere else.
The future
Building a niche channel has taught me that growth doesn’t necessarily come from becoming broader. Sometimes it comes from becoming more distinctive, more relevant to the audience you already have and better at giving them something they can’t find elsewhere.
That is what we’ll be focused on as we take CultRepo into its next stage – building on the community we’ve created, while continuing to prove just how big a niche audience can become.
Emma Tracey is founder and CEO of CultRepo
